Ab Foods

Feed Those Abs The Right Stuff

You likely know that when it comes to getting ripped abs, your diet plays an extremely large role. Regardless of the type of program you follow, if you aren’t eating ab foods (which are geared toward helping you lose fat), you won't see results. It really is that simple.

You have to push your limits to get the abs you want. To get defined abs, you’re going to have to obtain very low body fat digits. While you might be able to get chiseled arms and potentially even get some leg veins showing when you’re at higher levels, abs are not going to appear as easily.

You’re going to need to tighten up on the diet and only include the ab foods that are specifically geared toward maximum fat loss and muscle maintenance.

Here are the ab foods that should be filling your plate throughout the day.

Low-sodium cottage cheese

Protein is an integral component to a fat-loss diet because it’s the single macronutrient that is going to promote muscle maintenance. You can cut both fat and carbohydrates down, but without enough protein your results will be less than optimal.

However, all proteins are not alike. When dieting to very low caloric digits, hunger is going to be calling your name. You want to minimize this by selecting ab foods that are going to digest the slowest and keep you satisfied the longest. Dieting on ab foods gets tough when 20 minutes after a meal, you’re ready for the next.

Cottage cheese is a terrific source of casein protein — one of the slowest digesting protein sources out there. When shopping for your cottage cheese, opt for a low-sodium variety. While salt is not necessarily always a bad thing, depending on your current health status and the rest of your diet, in the case of abs, we need to minimize water retention as best as possible.

At about 500 mg of sodium per half-cup of regular cottage cheese, water retention could prove to be an issue.

Apples

If you’ve cut down your carb intake, and as you move toward the 5% to 8% body fat range, hunger will likely be an issue. Your body simply does not like being this lean and it’s going to fight you. Hunger is a good way of doing so.

Further to the point, on diets that are very low in calories (like diets full of ab foods), you are definitely going to be in a catabolic state (tissue breakdown). This can spell trouble for the muscle mass you’ve worked so hard to attain and it needs to be minimized.

The liver is the primary determinant (after total calorie intake) of whether you are in a catabolic or anabolic state. As such, the type of carbohydrates in fruit is treated slightly different than, say, the carbohydrates in rice or bread, and will send a much stronger signal to the liver to not be in a catabolic state.

You may still not be able to cross over into an anabolic state since that’s near impossible if you are eating under maintenance, but you can minimize the damage done to your tissues. Fruit will help you do this; shoot to eat one to two pieces a day.

Apples as ab food work great because they won’t raise blood sugar very much and will supply you with plenty of fiber, which helps with the hunger issue.

Coconut oil

One type of oil that many people rarely even think about eating is coconut oil, and it can actually be beneficial when added to your selection of ab foods.